Inside the Mind of Hiring with Dr. Mickey Fineberg: Business Psychologists Enabling the Selection and Preparation of Great Leaders: The Importance of Clear Job Specs; What Might Happen if They’re Not

During the last few episodes, we’ve been discussing the benefits of a good hiring team in developing job specs as a foundation for recruiting, evaluating, and selecting successful managers and executives.  I was recently asked to do an executive assessment for a media company that (in part) provides information to businesses to help them protect assets and people’s lives, minimize costs, and maximize sales opportunities. It’s been a successful segment that needs acceleration, The position is Senior Vice President. Business Intelligence, a B to B program development and execution role.  In prior years, Business Intelligence had its own sales, marketing, technical, and operations groups reporting to a profit center GM. Now these groups are under separate functional leaders in a new matrix environment. So, the only people directly managed by the SVP are project managers and an inside service and sales support team. The job specs focused on the SVP’s needs to be a great collaborator in both program development and implementation. Initially, I’m thinking that collaborative team play is a key element along with strong program analytic, development, organization, and coordination skills. However, the hiring team’s job description used words like “spearhead and drive the business” which sounded more like direct business leadership. The CEO helped me get clearer the organization structure change and the matrix emphasis.

The candidate’s background emphasized organizational and executive support but not direct business driving positions. That said, there was noteworthy success in business analytics related to mergers and acquisitions and playing a support role in orchestrating these organizational growth deals. In the most recent job, he had some influence in getting his company to create a separate business division of a previously integrated enterprise. He was appointed to a Chief Commercial job where he supported the Sales VP in shaping and negotiating sales contracts at the executive level. The candidate also had nice experience in SaaS companies, a similar to my client.

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